Countermeasures to Deal with Smurfs in Competitive Duel Divisions
LFSMx
It's a frequent occurrence to have smurf accounts clog up the limited spots in the promotion zone of a ranked division, therefore causing the users that've been trying to climb the ranks for months (or longer) to wait another week until they're
hopefully
placed into a grouping without smurfs where they can actually get a fair and honest week of competition.To give some context for those that may be unfamiliar - Master I, for example, has weekly groupings of 30 people each where only the top 3 in each group get promoted. If 2 out of 3 of those people are smurfing (playing on brand new accounts with less than 50 career games, but rated 200+ over the avg rating necessary for promotion) you end up with 28 people all trying to fight for the only remaining spot that any of them have a realistic shot at reaching.
One suggestion to counter this would be to allow for some kind of fast-track for rank promotion, where if someone is so far ahead of the rank's average rating, they auto promote to the next best rank, rather than keeping them held in the lower ranks and potentially having negative affects like previously mentioned. Doing this would benefit both parties - It would allow the smurf to reach a more accurate rank at a quicker pace and it would allow the non-smurfs to have a better shot at getting a fair weekly grouping.
I'm curious if others also feel this way or if there's another suggested approach to dealing with this issue that hasn't been explored yet? I would love to hear the thoughts on this.
Shadow
I don't thjnk that is a solution because like someone already said, that would benefit cheaters. We want to discourage smurfing, not encourage it imo. The only way to deal with smurf accounts and cheaters in my opinion is to detect the behaviour early on and place them in a separate queue/leaderboard with other smurfers/cheaters, and let them have fun with eachother
LFSMx
Shadow I agree with you on wanting to discourage smurfing. However, I feel that the way the system was built, having weekly divisions like this with limited promotion spots only incentivizes the smurfing. Weekly divisions only add an unnecessary layer of bulk to duels for people to worry about when all that should genuinely matter is player rating.
Going back to the example I mentioned in the OP, if someone is at a rating that would typically allow them to promote, but they aren't able to promote because they were grouped with people rated 200+ over the normal promotion threshold - this system incentivizes them to just wait and just play 1 game a week until they get a fair grouping. While they wait for a fair weekly grouping, they may play on a smurf account of their own in the meantime. It would seem that the only logical solution to deal with this constant cycle of smurfing to deal with other smurfs would be to outright not allow it.
It's hard to understand how weekly ranked divisions brings anything of value to the game when it seems like everything could be based off player rating alone (i.e. players under 700 rating only having access to moving mode and the basic 'World' map). This would allow someone to improve and jump up into the next rating bracket as soon as they can, instead of empowering the smurfs and letting them create a negative impact on other players week after week.
On top of that, the current weekly system encourages people to stop playing once they reach a safe spot in the promotion zone until the new week starts. I doubt this was the intent of the way the system was built, but one would assume they would want more people playing, not less - especially when queue times can be slow at times.
Thanks for helping brainstorm some ideas on how to deal with this! Hopefully some of the suggested concepts might appear intriguing to the devs 😊
Oden
Upvoted but I think this countermeasure would end up motivating players to cheat more in order to win and fast advance ranks. Since it's guaranteed that they would rank up faster, duels would become speedruns, which is funny because if that happened, GG devs would need to update the overwatch system for catching cheaters as the number would increase. I stopped playing duels several months ago and I'm left with a rating that has nothing to do with my actual skill level. If I were to comeback with this feature implemented, would it be any different? I don't think so. I absolutely love the idea but it needs to be developed further.
LFSMx
Oden Thanks for the input. I agree, there's definitely more work to be done.